


could be wrong; the thing is, I've been right

by CountingNothings



Category: Naruto
Genre: Flirting As Flirting, Getting Together, Light Angst, M/M, but entirely about The Nature of Being a Shinobi, jounin are fucking weird, mission reports as flirting, using light taijutsu on pre-genin as flirting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25283458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountingNothings/pseuds/CountingNothings
Summary: “You know, you talk a lot of shit for someone with such soft, kissable lips.”Kakashi, to his credit, looks as surprised as Iruka feels, although Iruka’s inner monologue points out with no small amount of acidity that Kakashi is the one swearing in the mission room (talking about kissing, in the mission room!) while Iruka is the one who has been interrupted in the midst of delivering a long-overdue, well-deserved chewing out. Only one of them is really justified in being surprised.(rated for some swears and mentions of, like, the indisputable in-universe fact that we're up here killing children)
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka
Comments: 32
Kudos: 210





	could be wrong; the thing is, I've been right

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from TOTEM’s “Pride,” which is significantly more angst-ridden about thinking someone might be into you than this fic is.

“You know, you talk a lot of shit for someone with such soft, kissable lips.”

Kakashi, to his credit, looks as surprised with this pronouncement as Iruka feels, although Iruka’s inner monologue points out with no small amount of acidity that _Kakashi_ is the one swearing in the mission room (talking about kissing, in the mission room!) while _Iruka_ is the one who has been interrupted in the midst of delivering a long-overdue, well-deserved chewing out. Only one of them is really justified in being surprised.

The shock on Kakashi’s face is morphing into something pink and frankly almost endearing.

If Iruka were a different man, he’d pretend no one had mentioned anyone else’s lips, but he is who he is, so instead he’s torn between “Do you really think you can distract me from demanding more legible mission reports?!” and “Did that line come directly from the pages of Icha Icha?!”

He settles on Icha Icha. It feels more clever, like it will earn him an appreciative chuckle from Kotetsu over drinks. If he has to figure out a professional way of extricating both himself and an alarmingly red Hatake Kakashi from this uncomfortable situation, he’s at least going to get a good story out of it.

Kakashi brightens considerably.

 _Oh no_ , Iruka thinks, and then, _maybe he’s just relieved that I’ve stopped yelling about the report_.

“Do you really think it’s a good enough line for Icha Icha?” Kakashi asks, visible eye crinkled, one hand curled protectively over the book-shaped bulge inside his vest. “Maybe I should submit it to Jiraiya…”

The phrase “good enough” paired with “Icha Icha” feels somewhat oxymoronic to Iruka, but he’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“If you do submit it, Kakashi-san, I sincerely hope that your handwriting is more legible than it is on this report, or else Jiraiya-sama will not be able to read it and assess its quality.”

He levels Kakashi with as stern a glare as he can muster, uncomfortably aware of the thin line into which his lips have fallen. Is this more kissable, or less? Will he ever be able to do anything with his mouth again without thinking about the relative kissability of his lips?

Kakashi’s smile wavers only a little.

“I’ll be sure to use my best penmanship, Iruka-sensei. Thanks for the tip!”

And just like that, Iruka is left with a report for which “sub-par” would be an undeserved compliment, and a growing tension headache. Oh, and his lips. He rubs them together. They aren’t really all that soft.

*

Later, at the bar, he’s doing a passable Kakashi impression using a series of bar napkins to hide most of his face, and Kotetsu and Izumo are in stitches. Izumo has fervently declared, on more than one occasion, that he “lives for your jounin impressions, Iruka, quick, quick, do Asuma.” It’s a better way of blowing off the steam of their incompetence, he’ll be the first to admit, than yelling at them in person.

“And then he goes,” Iruka says in his storytelling voice, thick with the promise of shocking revelations, “‘Iruka-sensei, you talk a lot of crap for having such soft, kissable lips.’”

Kotetsu’s drink goes up his nose, which is both incredibly gratifying and disappointingly distracting. When he’s finally breathing properly and Izumo has finished suggesting various rinsing methods, Kotetsu looks at Iruka’s lips assessingly.

“I can see it,” he says. “Not enough to fixate on it the way Kakashi clearly has, but I can see it.”

When Iruka raises his eyebrows - the makeshift mask and hitae-ate are crumpled on the table, full of Kotetsu’s nose sake - Kotetsu unhelpfully clarifies, “The kissability of your lips, I mean.”

“Is it ‘kissability,’ or ‘kissableness’?” Izumo asks, and the next quarter of an hour is spent with Iruka painstakingly explaining the nominalisation of adjectives. By the third bottle of sake between them, Iruka is waxing eloquent on the categories of verbal noun and the dubious aesthetic value of the word “gerund.”

It’s very nice, as nights out go. Sometimes they end up discussing the Hokage’s filing system instead, and that’s a recipe for angry drunkenness. This cheerily pedantic buzz is infinitely preferable.

*

It’s a truth that seems to apply across the shinobi world: jounin are fucking weird. They say weird things, they dress in inexplicable and impractical ways, they have all sorts of hangups and foibles and particularities, and they never really seem to be able to do paperwork. 

It’s almost like the more impressive, chakra-draining jutsu you’re capable of performing on the battlefield, the worse your ability to do routine administrative tasks. Iruka sometimes wonders if jounin make ritual sacrifices of their penmanship and reading comprehension as part of the learning-a-new-jutsu process.

Of course, there’s only space for so much in the human brain and muscle memory, and jounin are fucking weird because they have boatloads of un-dealt-with trauma, so in his more generous moments, Iruka doesn’t really blame them for forgetting the basics of filling in blanks. When your choices for filling your brain space include “the faces of every teammate who’s died in the field” and “the thousand and one sounds a body makes in its last moments,” “the correct format for dating a report” is probably not even a contender.

As a result, Kakashi is nowhere near the first jounin to say something bizarre and unpremeditated to Iruka in the mission room, and he certainly won’t be the last. Sure, no one has ever commented on the specific qualities of his lips before (what does “kissable” even mean?), but jounin are remarkably creative. It’s a life-saving skill most of them don’t know how to turn off.

Who knows where their minds go when they’re ignoring Iruka’s lectures? His pre-genin get the same glazed looks on their faces, and they come back with similarly inane and off-topic outbursts. He sometimes thinks he should save himself the trouble and just avoid the lectures altogether, but they’re deeply satisfying on levels he doesn’t really care to explore.

And, truth be told, there is the occasional improvement after a chewing out. Sometimes he goes whole weeks without a dull shuriken thudding into the wood of his desk. Sometimes he goes whole days without having to do more than basic spelling corrections on a mission report.

Granted, Kakashi has never once improved in all the time that Iruka has been yelling about his reports, but if Naruto can be made to hold off shuriken-throwing until the designated time, there’s hope for even the most incorrigible report-writers.

*

The next time he takes a report from Kakashi, it looks as though it has been through something’s digestive system. It’s the end of a double shift that Iruka had not expected to take, and he has dealt with no fewer than two dozen jounin delivering reports in various stages of decomposition, in addition to the chunin reports that all need just a bit of tweaking and the genin reports that bring out Iruka’s best classroom voice.

“Kakashi-san,” he sighs, gloomily postponing his post-mission-desk, pre-homework-marking nap yet again, “I suspect this report will contaminate everything it touches. Do you care at all about keeping Konoha’s archives safe and intact?”

Kakashi smiles weakly, cheeks moving underneath his mask, hand coming up to rub at the short hairs on the back of his neck.

“My apologies, Iruka-sensei,” he says, and Iruka inwardly prepares for the obvious lie. “I spent the better part of this afternoon inside the large intestine of a toad, and everything is a little bit the worse for the wear.”

Iruka glances down at the scroll between them on the mission desk and mentally congratulates himself for picking “digested” from the list of reasons why a mission report might look as slimy as this one does.

“Be that as it may,” he responds, more gently than he might have if he wasn’t floundering without a lie to diffuse, “I still can’t accept it.”

Kakashi nods. He can’t have expected anything different.

“I’ll write you something better when I can,” he promises, and before Iruka can be outraged at the nebulous timeline implied in “when I can,” he’s swept out of the room, leaving the next shinobi in line to look dubiously at the slowly spreading pool of goo around the scroll. 

It isn’t until much later, in the midst of plying the red pen with fervour, that Iruka thinks to ask himself why Kakashi told him what sounded awfully like the truth.

 _Will wonders never cease_ , he thinks. Jounin get weirder every day.

*

The partially-digested mission report earns Iruka pity shots the next time he and Anko are out. 

She is also very curious as to how much damage the digestive fluid did to his desk (none, thank everything holy), how he disposed of the mission scroll (well-placed paper bomb in a controlled environment, as per protocol), and whether Iruka had actually tried to read the report (no, absolutely not, his hands are too valuable to risk like that).

Near the end of the evening, when they are sitting companionably back to back under the stars in the Academy playground, Anko tells him about the digestive fluids of her snakes. He swings his arm around to smack her bicep at a particularly gross detail, and she laughs without a tinge of bitterness. It doesn’t happen often. He savours the sound.

When he wakes up on her couch a few hours later to a throbbing headache and the disconcerting sound of rustling, he holds the memory of her shaking shoulders close and tries to fall back asleep. He dreams of being inside a toad-snake’s belly. Anko is there, pontificating on the various things the fluid around them can dissolve. At some point, she morphs into Kakashi, who heartily tells him that, given the tenderising effect of bile, soon all of him will be as soft as his lips.

*

“Kakashi-san,” he is forced to say as he shovels eggplant into his mouth with one hand while keeping the other firmly on a regulation-sharp kunai that one of his pre-genin illicitly brought to class and keeps fruitlessly trying to steal back, “This is not the mission desk. I can’t accept your report here.”

Kakashi doesn’t pick the scroll back up from Iruka’s desk.

He points at the kunai instead. “Anticipating an assassin, Iruka-sensei?”

“Don’t change the subject,” Iruka warns. “Pick up that report and take it to the mission desk, Whoever is on duty will help you.”

The small Hyuuga from whom Iruka confiscated the kunai this morning executes an almost-passable lunge and gets his knuckles rapped with the end of Iruka’s chopsticks. He contemplates doing something similar to Kakashi’s long fingers - and since when has he been thinking about the shape of Kakashi’s fingers? - but thinks better of it. After all, he doesn’t want to discourage the reaching out and picking up of out-of-place scrolls.

But Kakashi is already distracted, the banished Hyuuga (lurking just outside the classroom, very obviously; Iruka will have to add some remedial stealth practice to next week’s lesson plan) setting the gears turning in his head.

“Is this a test for your students, Iruka-sensei?” he asks, a sunny smile all but obscuring a mischievous glint that does Iruka’s trickster heart good to see. He thinks of Anko’s unfettered laughter, and of how hard it must be for jounin to have any kind of fun.

“It is now,” Iruka says, and, “you can help, if you put that mission report back in your pocket before I’ve finished my lunch.”

*

Who is more delighted by the game of keep-away? Iruka finds it hard to say. 

His pre-genin are beside themselves with glee as he unleashes harmless traps, sets easily-dispelled barriers, and pops out the odd clone to chase them, shrieking, around their desks. 

Kakashi looks as if he smiled any harder, his face would fall off. From where Iruka is currently standing, the taijutsu he’s using is very obviously slowed down, but the pre-genin don’t know that; they’re thrilled with every punch and kick they land, and Kakashi looks like he is, too. When he flips them carefully onto their backs or strikes out with soft taps that they sometimes succeed in dodging, he positively glows. 

The Hyuuga kunai, crowned with braided flowers and resting on a throne made of requisitioned bento boxes, remains untouched, but several students have gotten close, making little chalk marks before Iruka or Kakashi intervene. Iruka has promised that whoever’s mark is the closest when the recess bell rings will get five extra chances the next time they practice with shuriken. So far, unsurprisingly, a Nara girl is winning, but there’s still almost ten minutes left before the bell. 

Kakashi howls in mock-anguish as someone’s little foot connects with his forearm. 

Iruka sets a trap with the cold tea he never got around to drinking this morning.

*

When the pre-genin have collapsed in the playground, no doubt causing the recess monitor on duty a little consternation, Iruka surveys the disaster that is his classroom and sighs happily.

“I can see why you love teaching,” Kakashi remarks from where he, too, has collapsed, arm thrown across his eye.

“Not every day is like this,” Iruka tells him. “We do a lot of what I’m reliably informed is boring junk.”

He starts to move around, collecting the larger pieces of debris into his little waste basket. Kakashi remains sprawled on the floor, and Iruka thinks, _typical_ , and then wonders what makes him so sure it is.

“I meant the kids themselves,” Kakashi says, and there’s something like yearning in his voice. “I meant, if every day you get to be with people who can escape into joy so easily, who can act with their whole hearts even though some of them are damaged, I can see why you would want to stay.”

Iruka would be lying if he said he hasn’t had almost exactly these thoughts before. 

He knows what comes next, and he can’t not say it. “It balances out the knowing that, statistically, a third of them will die before they come of age, and about a quarter will end up in someone’s bingo book for being very good at killing.” It comes out more harshly than he intends it to. It’s not like Kakashi, who was ANBU before he started shaving, needs the reminder.

“I can only imagine.” Kakashi’s voice is soft. “I’ve known them for ninety minutes and I already feel as though I would give my life to keep any one of them from that fate.”

And, really, there is nothing to say to that. Kakashi is hardly the first jounin to obliquely confess to Iruka that they are torn between wanting children and not wanting to add bodies like kindling to the endless fire that is shinobi warfare. He will not be the last. 

Iruka bends to mop up the tea puddle left when an Inuzuka and his puppy tripped a hastily-laid wire.

“How do you do it?” Kakashi asks, and this question, too, is not new.

“I say to myself: each lesson that they learn from me could give them one more day. Each bond they make with their peers, each memory of laughter, could give that one day meaning. Our world wants to kill these children, Kakashi. All I can do is try to help them spit in the world’s eye before they go.”

Kakashi rolls to all fours, then gets to his feet, his motions almost too fast for Iruka’s eyes to follow. He straightens the desks back into their rows and picks up some unidentifiable debris that Iruka’s sweep has missed. He dismantles the bento throne and sets the boxes in a neat line along the front of Iruka’s desk, gently moving papers and pencil holders around until everything is at right angles. He stacks the coloured-powder paper bombs that remain untriggered and hands them to Iruka.

Their eyes meet as their hands do. Kakashi’s fingers are cool where they press into Iruka’s palm.

“Thank you, Iruka,” Hatake Kakashi says to him. “I had a lot of fun today. Perhaps we can do it again sometime.”

And then he is gone, and the bell is ringing and Iruka’s class is dragging themselves in, still comparing colour splotches and battle tactics, and Iruka thinks, _oh_.

*

Sakura comes by to show off her newest medical ninjutsu technique, as she does at regular intervals. Iruka never asks her why, just sits back and enjoys the sheer delight she takes in her own work. He is unstinting with his praise for her power, and unrelenting in his criticism of her form. He sometimes wonders if he will always be her teacher, if there will come a day when she no longer seeks out his affirmation or wants him to push her to excel. 

“I’ve been thinking,” she tells him when they have put the disgruntled resurrected fish back into the river, “that it might be a good idea to have some basic medical ninjutsu classes at the Academy. You know, for scraped knees and the like.” She doesn’t say what she’s so obviously thinking, that if she had known this path was possible when she was younger, she might not have spent all those years thinking herself useless despite Iruka’s constant commendation.

“It’s a good idea,” he agrees. “And it would certainly save me bandages.” He’s already thinking about how a practical application like healing might help those of his students who are still struggling to master basic chakra control. 

“I haven’t talked about it to Tsunade-sama yet,” she says. “I wanted to ask you first, you know, if you thought it made sense, from a teacher’s perspective.”

“I’m touched,” he says, and he is, he’s so happy that he gets another day of being her teacher. “But, Sakura, you’re wise enough to know that this is a good idea without my endorsement. Don’t sell yourself short!”

Her smile is radiant, in the way that it is more and more these days, and he thinks, _maybe when she’s a jounin she won’t be as fucking odd as the rest of them_.

*

He expresses this hope to Shizune the next time they find themselves together in the back room of a mostly-civilian bar to which both of them pretty regularly flee to escape Hokages and pre-genin. 

Shizune, herself an incredibly well-adjusted jounin, nods fervently. “As long as we keep her away from drink and gambling, she should be fine. Her personality is enough like Tsunade-sama’s that she’ll probably be pretty stable otherwise.”

Iruka doesn’t say that the drinking and the gambling are, to his mind, symptoms rather than causes. Shizune may be one of the most accomplished medics currently living, but even she has holes in her diagnostic sense. _She deserves to have the peace they bring_ , he thinks; _she deserves to believe, even if for only a moment, in simpler answers_.

*

It’s a quiet day at the mission desk, and Iruka is catching up on a little light reading when Maito Gai walks in, cocks a hip, and begins loudly declaiming his capacity for perfectly-written reports. Kotetsu snickers. Iruka is tempted to join him.

“Did you have a report to hand in, Gai-san?” he asks instead, closing his book.

Gai darts over to his desk and whispers, in tones definitely audible to at least half of Konoha, “It has come to my attention that my esteemed rival is often at the receiving end of some brutal tongue-lashings, and not the kind he’d really like to be.” 

He winks, and Iruka stifles a grin. Jounin don’t get much weirder than Gai, but it’s an endearing kind of weird, and one that Iruka respects a great deal.

Gai continues: “As his closest companion, I have taken it upon myself to spur him to as great success in reporting his missions as he has in fulfilling them!”

“That’s very kind of you, Gai-san,” Iruka says.

“ETERNAL RIVAL!” Gai bellows, and Iruka half-expects Kakashi to pop out as if summoned.

He doesn’t, at least not in the two and a half minutes Gai spends pacing and pounding an open palm with the opposite fist, brow furrowed in concentration. He visibly perks up on his fifth circuit of the mission room, finger raising in a perfect and unwitting parody of a cartoonish lightbulb.

He doesn’t say anything more than “Of course! My devious rival!” before dashing out onto the street.

It’s the most exciting thing to happen all day, but it does give Iruka material for another installment of Jounin Impersonations, and Kotetsu’s editorialising leaves Izumo gasping for breath as they finish their beer later that evening. 

“I wonder what tongue-lashing Kakashi really wants to have,” Izumo muses, too innocently.

“It’s Gai,” Iruka points out, hoping to forestall a conversation about the sexual habits of their social superiors. “He probably meant that Kakashi wants challenges to his youthful glow rather than reminders that his handwriting could stump an army of codebreakers.”

Kotetsu’s head swivels toward him. “Careful, Irukai,” he teases. “That sounds an awful lot like a compliment.”

*

Iruka _is_ careful, a lot of the time. Maybe not as much as he ought to be, and certainly not anywhere close to all the time, but often, and where it matters. 

He’s careful about his money, and careful with his students, and careful not to drink more than his stomach can handle. 

He’s careful with his possessions, his clothes and his arsenal; he’s careful with his friends when they’ve gone through bad breakups or bad missions or bad breakups while on bad missions. 

He’s careful not to dwell on how Hatake Kakashi’s voice sounds around the syllables of his name. He’s careful not to give into the temptation to let their hands brush over the mission desk. 

He’s careful, he’s oh-so-careful, not to think about a different world, one without trauma and death, where he could come home from school to see two other pairs of sandals, small and large, waiting for him in the genkan. 

*

The day that Sakura comes to teach his pre-genin basic medical ninjutsu, Iruka waits until everyone has left to cry. 

He is so _proud_ of her, his little know-it-all, for how gracious she has become, how encouraging. How confident: she started the class nervously looking back at him every few minutes, but by halfway through she was soaring under her own power and all he had to do was hold back tears. 

The class was on their best behaviour, which leaves a lot to be desired but is still worth commending (he does, after she leaves with the promise of a debrief; positive reinforcement is a crucial tool in any teacher’s survival kit). Some of them even have a bit of an aptitude for focusing their chakra on the little scratches she had them make on the backs of their own hands. He’s so proud of them, too. Even the ones who will never, ever master anything remotely like what Sakura can do.

She had told them that, bluntly: not all of you will be able to do this. That’s fine. Rather than being jealous of what your friends can do, spend your energy figuring out your own skills, so that you can be a good teammate for them when the time comes.

He replays the moment, now that he can cry freely, and his eyes are blurred enough that he can see exactly how her graduating class had sat in his little classroom, the ley lines of all their petty rivalries.

More of this current class will survive, maybe, because of the skills that Sakura opened their eyes to. More of them will avoid broken friendships. 

All of them, he thinks, have gained some respect for the work that medics do, and that’s a major accomplishment for the children of a village that specialises more in blowing things apart than in putting them back together. He’s overwhelmed by imagining the good that will come of them learning all of these things, by the good that his student has done just by being her talented, caring self. 

His student! Teaching! A fresh flood of tears pours down his nose and he resigns himself to waiting until after dark to sneak from his classroom, so that he doesn’t have to explain why a very successful lesson has left him so weepy.

*

Kakashi falls into step beside him on his way to his debrief with Sakura the next day, and although he’s trying to play it cool Iruka knows what he’s after.

“She’s an amazing instructor,” Iruka says, and Kakashi’s sigh is so happy, in another world he’d be floating on the cloud of it.

“Thanks to you, sensei,” Kakashi says, all warm and light and joyful.

Iruka snorts. “You were her teacher much longer than I was, _sensei_.”

“Ah,” says Kakashi, “the past tense! A sure sign that you’re devaluing your ongoing contribution to the phenomenon that is our mini-Tsunade!”

Iruka laughs; Kakashi’s tone is almost a perfect match for his own outraged voice when Kakashi turns in a far-from-exemplary mission report. 

“I didn’t know you did impressions,” he says, still chuckling, and Kakashi says “Just for you” and Iruka chokes a little.

Surely he meant just _of_ you? 

The carefulness at Iruka’s core makes him steer into the swerve. “I suppose you’ve been on the receiving end of my lectures enough that you deserve to be on the giving end, for once.”

Kakashi nods decisively - not that Iruka is looking; he catches it out of the corner of his eye. And, you know? So what if he is looking, it’s polite to look at people when you talk to them, even if you are walking side by side toward a restaurant at a much slower pace than your lateness for your meeting demands, even if you are refusing to examine why it is that you are dragging your feet.

“I think giving and receiving are both essential parts of a working relationship,” Kakashi tells him, smile evident in his voice. There’s something teasing there, too, something warm and a little bubbly, and Iruka refuses to examine that, either.

“Then you have my permission to lecture me, on occasion, when I deserve it,” he says. 

“Thank you, Iruka,” Kakashi says. “I’ll keep that in mind for when I’m in a giving mood.”

Iruka wonders if he’ll regret this, but he’s using up all his careful on not reaching across the few inches that separate his hand from Kakashi’s. And, you know? So what if he regrets it. It’s good to have friends - are they friends? it's good to have acquaintances - who can lecture you when necessary.

“This is me,” Iruka says, into the companionable silence that has filled the last metres to the restaurant. “Sakura asked for a debrief.” 

He turns to face Kakashi, finally allowing himself to actually look. “Thank you for walking with me!”

Kakashi’s smile lifts his mask tight over his lips. “Thank you for indulging me! I’m glad to hear that Sakura did so well, although truly I would have expected nothing less from our star pupil.”

Iruka is so focused on the shape of Kakashi’s mouth that it takes him a moment to register the plural pronoun.

“With your permission, I’ll tell her you said so,” he responds, thankful that his ingrained politeness can run on autopilot while the rest of his brain sinks into a brief, blissful image of Sakura attaining some important goal while he and Kakashi smile proudly on, arms around each other, because she is theirs and they are a they.

“Of course!” Kakashi says. “She ought to know how proud we are of her.”

This continued use of “we” is not helping the image go away. Instead, it prompts Iruka to blurt out, “Why don’t you join us and tell her yourself?”

“I couldn’t,” Kakashi says, but when Iruka levels a stern look at him he raises both gloved hands in mock surrender and agrees to appetisers, only, just long enough to gush before leaving the professionals to their work.

*

After he’s left, settling his bill (and Sakura’s drinks, it later develops) at the cash on his way out, Sakura turns a knowing look at Iruka and says, “Spill, Iruka-sensei. I felt like I was out to dinner with my parents and I want to know why.”

He has enough careful left in him to say, “I’m not sure why, Sakura-chan. You know, neither Kakashi nor I are proud of you because of any parental feelings. You did a genuinely amazing job yesterday!”

Her eyes make it clear that she’s dropping this, for now, because she does actually want to get to debriefing the class, but he knows her well enough to read the warning. Another time, another place, he’ll be back in the hot seat, and she’ll expect some less avoidant answers. Frankly, he’d like some, himself.

*

“No, I insist,” Kakashi says, to the shinobi behind him in line. “Go ahead of me, please. I can see you’re dead on your feet!”

This is the third person he’s let through, and Iruka is uncareful enough to admit to himself that he hopes it’s because Kakashi is waiting until his desk is free, so he can give his report to Iruka. It’s just more jounin weirdness, he tells himself, sternly, but that doesn’t help, because his stern voice is the one that Kakashi apparently can mimic on a dime, and does that mean he’s been listening intently to Iruka all this time? Without improving his reports, implying some other reason for doing so?

The fourth shinobi is given a rude awakening when, instead of gesturing her forward, Kakashi marches straight to Iruka’s desk and presents his mission report, which looks miraculously unscathed.

Iruka feels incredulous, and knows he looks it.

“Dare I open this to see if it is as beautiful inside?” he gasps with a reverence that is only half-teasing.

“As you’re an expert in both inner and outer beauty, there’s no one else I’d rather critique my aesthetic efforts!” Kakashi says, smile bright.

So, carefully, Iruka breaks the seal and unrolls the report. The handwriting is atrocious, as usual, but the boxes are all filled out - even the optional one about accommodations - which is something Iruka is pretty sure he’s never seen before from this particular jounin.

“Congratulations!” he says, lifting his eyes to Kakashi’s and forgetting to look away. “While I am perhaps the only person who can decode your handwriting, thus ensuring that the details of this mission are eventually lost, it is complete and in good enough shape to file!”

Kakashi hums. “I don’t think my handwriting is _that_ bad, Iruka.”

They are close enough that Iruka can see the outline of Kakashi’s lips as they shape his name, close enough that he can’t avoid noticing Kakashi notice his gaze lingering on them.

Iruka says, “Your handwriting is possibly the worst in Konoha, Kakashi. Perhaps the worst in all the Land of Fire. Frankly, I cite you as a reason why we need to have writing tutors at all levels of the Academy, for the hopeless cases.”

“Really,” Kakashi responds, and his tone is so light, too light, and Iruka knows he has stepped into a trap but cannot quite figure out what it is. 

“Really,” he says, to say something.

“Well, then.” Kakashi puts another piece of paper, gently but firmly, on Iruka’s desk, at a perfect right angle to the edge. “I guess it’s a good thing you’re well-versed in deciphering it.”

Iruka expects Kakashi to go then, to let him read the note and panic in the relative privacy of a busy mission room, perhaps to hyperventilate in the washroom, but jounin are fucking weird and Kakashi is right up there among the weirdest, no fucking manners, and he’s obviously waiting to watch Iruka read the note.

He picks it up without looking, feels for the edge, opens it.

When he finally tears his eyes from Kakashi’s face, from the sharp line of Kakashi’s chin, from the movement of Kakashi’s throat as he swallows, Iruka sees that it is blank. _Oh yes_ , he thinks. _This is definitely, definitely a trap_.

“I thought about picking a time and place,” Kakashi says, almost conversationally, although he’s not bothering to hide the thrum of nervous energy beneath his words, “but then I thought, why be presumptuous? You don’t know Iruka’s schedule, or what he likes to do. So I’m asking: what time in the next few days do you have a few hours free, and what is the thing we could do that would be most likely to result in my getting to kiss you?”

Iruka struggles to choke back everything he wants to say, because the answer is now, regardless of the fact that he still has two and a half hours left on his shift, and the answer is just stand there, because, truthfully, he’s been thinking more or less non-stop about kissing Kakashi since the great Kissable Lips incident of six months ago.

“This is a workplace, Kakashi-san,” he says. “And if you think that a single barely-competent report after literally dozens of aggressively incomplete ones is going to make me forget that, you have another thing coming.”

He feels like his grin is splitting his face in half, like he’ll have another scar to match the one across his nose. Kakashi is grinning back, the tension gone from his narrow shoulders.

“And another thing,” Iruka continues, warming to his theme.

He keeps going for some time, enjoying how the familiar sensation of being in control of the mess that the sheer existence of jounin brings to the world is threaded through with the heady awareness of the steady dilation of Kakashi’s pupil, the white-knuckled grip on the edge of Iruka’s desk that has got to be intentional because it is Doing Things to Iruka’s insides that demand follow-up. 

When Kakashi finally leaves, Iruka goes to pick up the blank note and notices that it’s not so blank, after all. On its reverse, Kakashi has doodled a little scarecrow and a little dolphin and somehow made them hold hands. Because jounin are fucking weird.

Iruka tucks the note into his pocket and somehow makes it through the end of his shift.

*

“Can I kiss you?” Iruka asks from his perch on Kakashi’s kitchen counter, and Kakashi’s kiss-bruised lips turn up into a wicked smile.

“Why, Iruka,” he says, in his best Iruka-making-a-rhetorical-point voice, “Whatever have you been doing up until now? If I had known that wasn’t kissing, I would have asked to switch activities an hour ago.”

“Strictly speaking,” Iruka says, hating a little bit that he can’t help but take on the voice himself, “We’ve been making out. There have been hands involved. I now have an intimate knowledge of your body temperature, which, by the way, is distressingly low. What I want to do is just to kiss you.”

“No hands?” Kakashi asks, lifting his from Iruka’s hips to plant them on the counter.

“No hands,” Iruka agrees. “And you have to let _me_ kiss _you_. I’m in a giving mood.”

“Bossy,” Kakashi says, in a dark voice that Iruka could get used to.

Iruka slides his own hands out from under the back of Kakashi’s shirt and reaches up to cup Kakashi’s jaw, to run his thumbs over Kakashi’s cheekbones. Kakashi’s sigh shudders out of him. His eyes flutter closed.

Iruka leans in and gently presses his lips to Kakashi’s with all the carefulness he thinks - he knows - that Kakashi deserves. He pauses, after a moment, rests his forehead against Kakashi’s, something feeling right about the vulnerability of bare skin that’s normally covered. 

Slowly, slowly, he moves his head down until he can reach Kakashi’s lips again, where he inhales Kakashi’s ragged exhale and feels something inside of him settle.

“Okay,” he says, against Kakashi’s lips, which are soft and which he hopes he never has to stop kissing. “Thank you.”

Kakashi keeps his hands rooted to the counter by Iruka’s hips, but he presses his lips firmly against Iruka’s, parts them with his tongue, urges Iruka back into something wild and joyful and achingly sweet.

* 

“You know what this is?” Kakashi will ask later, when the counter has gotten too uncomfortable and they’ve relocated to the couch. “This is spitting in the world’s eye and saying, we’ll take our happiness, thank you. We’ll give our lives some meaning, make the days we’re given count.”

Iruka will cry, a little, and press tiny kisses to the sharp line of Kakashi’s nose and say, firstly, “Yes. Oh, yes,” and then, “Please don’t teach my pre-genin about this particular way of making meaning. I have enough to deal with without twenty-six eight-year-olds experimenting with their biology.”

Kakashi will laugh, startled and delighted and so _happy_ it will hurt Iruka’s heart and send fresh tears threading down his face. And he will say, with all the seriousness in the world, “Iruka, you talk a _lot_ of shit for someone whose mouth is otherwise a fucking treasure.”

**Author's Note:**

> So I very accidentally stumbled into this ship during the Great Naruto Rewatch of Quarantine 2020: I opened the “relationships” filter drop-down here on AO3 and saw it and said “Oh. Oh, yeah, that tracks” and there it was, suddenly I shipped it. Thanks, KakaIru fandom! I haven’t written fic for Naruto since, like, 2005? 2006? and I’m pretty happy with how fun it still is.


End file.
